Mass Murder, SCOTUS Cold Draft, Putin Invasive Stall, Pro-Life Until

Continue reading “Mass Murder, SCOTUS Cold Draft, Putin Invasive Stall, Pro-Life Until”

SCOTUS, Abortion Decisions, Ukraine, GOP Humor, Susan Collins, Jan 6

  • Green Eagle detects a parallel between the political strategy that led to the disastrous prohibition era and current thinking in contemporary conservativism.
     
    Green Eagle is reasonably tuning out opinions about the right to make personal abortion decisions, on the reasonable grounds that opinions on both sides are totally predictable.
     
    I dunno. Let’s give it a try.
     
    Analysts keep telling us the prospective Supreme Court decision attacks the 14th Amendment. It doesn’t.
     
    My wife and I met and got married a little more than 20 years ago. If we had married here as teenagers, the marriage would have been annulled and we both would have been put in prison for violating Missouri Criminal Code, Section 563.240, specifically outlawing interracial marriage.
     
    That law was overturned as violating the 9th Amendment, which says rights not mentioned in the Constitution are emphatically protected by the Constitution. The 14th Amendment simply applies that protection to state, as well as federal, laws.
     
    The new leaked decision attacks the 9th Amendment. It says that protection, the protection that allows us to stay married, only applies to rights “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”.
     
    That means the 9th Amendment no longer means what the 9th Amendment says it means.
     
    That is why conservatives can now attack other rights in addition to abortion decisions, rights that may not have been “deeply rooted” at the time. Like gay rights, same sex marriage, birth control.
     
    And interracial marriage.
     
  • Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire News Group talk on podcast about fallout from the impending, already leaked, SCOTUS decision eliminating abortion rights, and how some lawmakers regard the new SCOTUS ruling as a start, not an end of their campaign to restrict that and other rights.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen suggests that the right to make a personal abortion decision has been abridged for decades. There is a difference between freedom to make an individual decision and freedom to purchase an abortion.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook contrasts the availability of male enhancement pills with the new law on who can make abortion decisions. She reaches an inevitable conclusion.
     
  • In Happiness Between Tails da-AL discusses the about-to-be law moving the right to make abortion decisions from each woman to each state legislature, and reveals a very personal story.
     
  • Andy Borowitz has the details as Senator Susan Collins calls 911 after checking her mail and discovering an anonymous copy of the Constitution. Took her a while to figure out what it was.
     
  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz is pro-choice. He mourns for those women who oppose allowing other women to make their own abortion decisions.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit suggests, persuasively, one reason so many Russian generals are killed in Ukraine.

Continue reading “SCOTUS, Abortion Decisions, Ukraine, GOP Humor, Susan Collins, Jan 6”

New Alex Conspiracy: QAnon is a Conspiracy Within a Lib Conspiracy

The current state of contemporary conservatism: A house of mirrors.

Aging Process

Burr phones in with apologies.
He is out today with tests for an age related condition, tests that are going longer than expected.

He does not see much advantage to the aging process,
and does not recommend it to others.

Despite advancing years, he assures us he will remain cheerfully immature.

He promises to be back next week.

Supreme Court and Rights:
This Has Gotten Personal

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

It is startling, perhaps even stunning, that a Supreme Court decision was leaked weeks ahead of its official release. Certainly an investigation will be launched. The leaker may yet be found.
 
We ought to be more shocked by the substance of the prospective decision.
 
The initial target, of course, is women.
 
I have long regarded the abortion debate to be valid on an individual level. Sometimes I think abortion is right, sometimes I’m against it.
 
But the decision has to be individual. As a practical matter, abortion bans involve the crushing of personal independence. It is not, and should not be, my decision, the decision of religious absolutists, or the decision of government.
 
The reasoning of the draft opinion, the opinion that has been leaked, goes beyond today’s outrage.
 
Beginning half a century ago, protection of a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy was based on the 9th and 14th Amendments. This new draft says that right is not covered because abortion was not part of America’s traditional rights.
 
The same interpretation of the 9th and 14th Amendments, before and since, protected voting rights for minorities, birth control, gay rights, same-sex marriage, and more. Saying that this legal basis is not valid, and was never valid, abolishes those legal protections.
 
The new draft decision should shock the conscience of anyone, no matter their circumstance.
 
I confess it does get even more personal for some of us.
 
Had my wife and I met and gotten married when we were decades younger, we would have been in violation of Missouri Criminal Code Section 563.240 specifically outlawing interracial marriage.
 
We would have been arrested and sent to prison. Both of us.
 
The protection of our rights, those of other couples, gay people, people who practice birth control, and women who do not wish to relinquish control of their bodies, is based on clear logic. The Constitution explicitly protects what are called unenumerated rights.
 
The Ninth Amendment:
 
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
 
For seven and a half decades, this was used to protect citizens from potential federal abuse of rights that were not specifically named. The fourteenth amendment extended that protection to state laws as well.
 
The Fourteenth Amendment includes this language:
 
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
 
The draft that the United States Supreme Court is due to officially announce in a few weeks includes this about unenumerated rights covered by those two amendments:
 
…any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”
 
We should find within ourselves a righteous and furious anger that the conservative Republican agenda has succeeded in targeting women.
 
We should find within ourselves more than a vague concern that it will not end there.

Ukraine Aid, French Landslide, White Nationalism, Books, Gays, Manly Men

  • PZ Myers has a suggestion on who could have played Putin in a movie about the invasion of Ukraine. If only the perfect player was alive.
     
  • Infidel753 speculates intelligently on what Putin really wants: a world based on past, way past, international ethics.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice Anthony Stahelski believes the unexpected hardship experienced by Putin’s Russia, and the unexpected world unity in opposition, serves as a warning to other dictators. He suggests we expand on that unity with even bolder action.
     
  • This week President Biden got the legislation he asked Congress to give him providing lots more aid to Ukraine. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit names the 10 members who voted against Ukraine. Procedure had to be followed first. 220 Republicans voted against having aid to Ukraine come to a vote at all. They were against helping Ukraine right before they were for it.
     
  • The Palmer Report explains why the landslide election of Emmanuel Macron in the election for President of France, beating Putin’s candidate, may be good news for our own President Biden.
     
  • In Hackwhackers we get a peek under the ideological hood of White Nationalism and how it has become the prototype for the Republican future.
     
  • In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson sees a traditional pattern of democratic vs autocratic governance creating opportunities for two right-wing, antidemocratic ideologies competing for control of the Republican party.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson seems impatient with conservative extremism:

  • Nojo points out the good news. All the conservative book banning won’t work. There are too many alternate sources of knowledge.
     
    The bad news about book banning comes from the good news. Conservatives won’t stop there because they can’t.
     
  • The Propaganda Professor has what amounts to case studies. “Left leaning” media has become complicit in spreading right wing agitprop, mostly because those on the right side of the political spectrum have become expert at spinning issues out of non-issues.
     
  • A while back, the Department of Homeland Security noticed that a lot of Putin disinformation was coming into social media from Russian hirelings pretending to be Americans. Sometimes the purpose was to get Americans to hate each other. Sometimes it was to get Americans to do crazy unhealthy things based on made up stories about Covid, vaccines, and bogus cures (Drink your own urine!!). Often the purpose was to spread Russian anti-American propaganda. It had all become a threat to US Security.
     
    That wasn’t the only use of disinformation. Border traffickers were broadcasting bogus stories to get more and more immigrants to flee violence in their home countries and come to the United States.
     
    So Homeland Security established the Disinformation Governance Board to expose the lies with documented truth. It became the source of warnings about Russian disinformation before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The this-is-what-the-Russian-trolls-are-about-to-say announcements, just hours before Russian media said them, turned out to be extremely effective in rallying the entire world.
     
    Naturally, some American conservatives became outraged. Still are.
    They charge censorship. It isn’t.
    A few on the more extreme edge anticipate conservatives being persecuted or imprisoned for their thoughts.
     
    For example our own Missouri Senator Josh Hawley:
    Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority.
    Sheeesh!
     
    Frances Langum notices one aspect that has the Fox Network especially worked up. Brian Kilmeade is mad as hell because the first Executive Director of the Board took the job while pregnant. How dare they put a pregnant woman in charge!

Continue reading “Ukraine Aid, French Landslide, White Nationalism, Books, Gays, Manly Men”

Iron Beam, Ukraine, War Humor, Putin, DeSantis v Mickey v Math, Debates

Continue reading “Iron Beam, Ukraine, War Humor, Putin, DeSantis v Mickey v Math, Debates”

Work Schedules

Ukraine Strikes Back, Hitler Worship, Jan 6, Slavery History, Immigration

  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit points to largely unnoticed, subtle, evidence that Putin’s flagship in the Black Sea was sunk by Ukrainian missiles, not by some Russian accident, as Putinites would have us believe.
     
  • What goes on in the bully-boy mind of Vlad?
    He sends his military to an easy takeover of Ukraine. They get bloodied in one battle after another.
    He sends threats to keep NATO countries from supplying Ukraine. Their transfer of weapons accelerates.
    He sends his flagship, the pride and joy of the Russian navy, to shell Ukraine. Ukraine sinks the ship.
     
    In Hackwhackers, Vlad uses intimidation to keep Finland and Sweden out of NATO. Guess what happens!
     
  • Must seem like this:

  • Nojo finds what is possible to find on what ordinary Russians are discovering about Putin’s Ukraine invasion, what they believe, and why.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has the links as yet another Russian who dares to speak up gets harassed, poisoned, and finally arrested in Moscow.
     
  • Infidel753 has refrained from extrapolating Putin’s genocidal ways into any characterizations about rightists in other countries. Putin has seemed fairly close to uniquely evil. But Marine Le Pen in France and a few public figures in the US force a course correction.
     
  • In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson acknowledges the anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln and reviews the similarities in threats to the Republic, then and now, the foremost of which was and is fear of democracy.
     
  • There are receipts, then there is proof, and then there is this. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors has more than documentation of what we pretty much already know. But this seems to seal the deal:
    Audio tapes of instructions issued to January 6 insurrectionists.
     
  • The Palmer Report contains a bit of well founded speculation about a new DOJ indictment and a prominent public figure who may be in legal jeopardy.
     
  • Grung_e_Gene takes a glance at an open push along a pathway to removing any democratic parts from democratic republic and tries to put a laptop into perspective.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged decides that, yes, you can sometimes take an incident involving an incidental public official and, from it, characterize the non-incidental nature of a political party. For example someone who lectures homeless people that they should model their lives after Adolf Hitler.
     
    One excerpt:
    When someone takes a look at the life story of Adolf Hitler, the takeaway should not actually be that, say what you will about the man, he was a real go‑getter.
     
  • Frances Langum takes notes as Jimmy Kimmel scores against Trump and Greene but completely stomps Mr. Gaetz into the ground.
     
    My thought:

Continue reading “Ukraine Strikes Back, Hitler Worship, Jan 6, Slavery History, Immigration”